Though the book is nonfiction, you have to be in a Saturday-cartoon mood to read “Worm,’’ which comes to the reader emblazoned with two promises: You will read about “the first digital world war” and the author, Mark Bowden, who also brought you “Black Hawk Down.”

That book, of course, was a detailed account of a physical war, in which 18 American soldiers died in an ill-fated attempt to capture deputies of a Somali warlord.

This time around, no one dies. The “worm,’’ naturally, is a self-replicating piece of computer programming that is designed with great cunning and puts 8 million computers around the world under the control of some unseen code lord.

Bowden attempts to find and control the creator of the Conficker code and dress it in capes and cartoon mythology throughout.

The good guys, ranging from T.J. Campana at the Digital Crimes Unit of Microsoft to the somewhat renegade Rick Wesson (who came up with the tactic of buying up domain names to slow down or stop the advance of the worm), are the X-Men.

Every chapter starts with a quote pulled from the X-Men, comic characters and movie heroes conjured up by Jack Kirby and Stan Lee.

“Remember — above all else you must remember teamwork! You must function as a one . . . always!” comes the exhortation from the “X-Men Chronicles” as the Cabal of computer-security experts head to a conference to better organize their effort to curb Conficker.

And when he’s in his Redmond, Wash., office trying to figure out how to get Internet providers, Microsoft and all the bad-guy fighters to coordinate their responses, Campana’s thoughts are described in comic-balloon fashion: “Sure, boss, I’ll save the Internet. Just let me get my cape here out of the locker!”

The buildup of the potential conflict takes a long time. Almost the entire first half of Bowden’s book is taken up with his history of the Internet, his character development and his shaping of the conflict.

“The world war was about nothing less than the soul of the future, the soul of the new global mind,’’ he concludes.

When he gets down to business, Bowden is quite good at making clear how the worm works and the various twists and turns that turn it into what seems a most threatening inhabitant of computers belonging to major corporations, government institutions and other significant but often somnambulant organizations.

But ultimately the reader is left without a battle of “good vs. evil, God vs. Satan” as is promised.

There is no great confrontation. The botmaster is never identified. The botnet is never launched into action.

In the end, the whole saga simply stops.

Splat.

Tom Steinert-Threlkeld has written on technology since 1979, when the Tandy TRS-80 and Apple II computers were rivals.